Tom Cunliffe

In another life, Tom Cunliffe read law at university, but rather than becoming a barrister he ran away to sea. After heading up a sailing school in the South of France, he served before the mast in small sailing ships, skippered yachts for private owners, raced offshore, worked as mate on a coasting merchant vessel and became an MCA Yachtmaster Ocean Examiner. He’s also a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation.

His first ocean voyage in the 1970s took him and his wife to Brazil and the Caribbean in a 1903 yacht. Over the years he has topped this off with trips to Greenland, the USA, the Mediterranean and who knows where else. In the late 1980s, his Edwardian pilot cutter was the third western yacht into Communist Russia after the revolution.

Tom’s twenty-five technical and historical books include two 'Best Book of the Sea' award winners, but things changed somewhat two decades ago when the BBC discovered he was at home in front of a camera. Two major TV series followed, leading to his ‘Yachts and Yarns’ YouTube channel with 40,000 subscribers, and the global Sea Chest on-line club.

In between all this and maintaining four regular magazine columns, he sails his yacht in Scandinavian waters all summer long, then winters with his wife and fellow-rover Roz in their New Forest cottage. Here, he drives and maintains a 1949 Bentley, initiating his grandsons into the mysteries of the four-stroke cycle. On the weekend when nobody is looking, he cultivates roses.